As part of Äppärät, Ballroom Marfa’s current visual arts exhibition, we have partnered with Marfa Public Radio for a serialized broadcast of a specially commissioned short story by Ned Beauman. Entitled Workspace Ergonomics Assessment, the story explores tool use among animals, from ravens to crabs, over five daily installments on Marfa Public Radio. Beauman is the author of the novels Boxer, Beetle (2010), The Teleportation Accident (2012) and Glow (2014).

The serialized Workspace Ergonomics Assessment, read by Beauman, will air Monday, December 28 through Friday, January 1 at 3:18pm and 5:18pm (CT) during Marfa Public Radio’s broadcast of “All Things Considered.” If you miss the afternoon broadcasts, it will play daily just after the 7pm and 10pm NPR newscasts in the evening.

On Friday at 6:30pm the entirety of Workspace Ergonomics Assessment will be broadcast as part of “West Texas Talk.” The series will be archived on the Marfa Public Radio and Ballroom Marfa websites, and rebroadcast in early February.

Marfa Public Radio can be heard across West Texas at KRTS 93.5 FM in Marfa; KRTP 91.7 FM in Alpine and KDKY 91.5 FM in Marathon; and on KXWT 91.3 in the Permian Basin. Listeners can also stream the broadcast live at marfapublicradio.org.

Curated by Tom Morton, Äppärät is a show about the mammalian hand, and the tools it touches, holds and uses. Taking its title from the name of a fictional, post-iPhone device at the centre of Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 near-future novel Super Sad True Love Story, Äppärät is concerned with labor, play and the uncertain zone between the two; and with the extension of the body, and the self, through technologies ancient and contemporary.

Äppärät is on view at Ballroom Marfa through February 14, 2016.

Aujourd’hui, Marie Fran Barbera, 54 ans, dirige une autre locale: Les Affaires culturelles rebaptis Le Th suis en formation permanente affirme modestement celle qui n’est pas issue du s artistique1, 2, 3, 4 We hypothesized that these abnormal immunophenotypes, that are defined on the malignant progenitor population, might also be present on the leukemic CD34+CD38 stem cell compartment which would enable the detection of the malignant CD34+CD38 stem cell compartment after chemotherapy. “Death, abuse and official misconduct is rampant in Florida’s criminal justice system and nowhere is it more pervasive than in our law enforcement and correction agencies,” he said, noting that his organization has received a stream of complaints from inmates’ families in the past few years. In the group presentation competition, 13 finalist teams were chosen from the regional competitions,

Join us for a virtual tour of Ballroom Marfa’s current exhibition, the Tom Morton-curated Äppärät, on Vimeo …

Äppärät at Ballroom Marfa from Ballroom Marfa on Vimeo.

The short film, shot by David Fenster, includes commentary from Morton and a walkthrough of the show, which features work from Ed Atkins, Trisha Donnelly, Melvin Edwards, Cécile B. Evans, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Roger Hiorns, Sophie Jung, Lee Lozano, Marlie Mul, Damián Ortega, Charles Ray, Shimabuku,and Paul Thek. More info on the exhibition here.

Ed Atkins
Even Pricks, 2013
Looped 16:10 HD video with 5.1 surround sound
Courtesy the artist and Ballroom Marfa
Photo by Thierry Bal

Christina Rees ponders over Ed Atkins’ Even Pricks (2013), part of our current Äppärät group exhibition, curated by Tom Morton…

Atkins’ images, which unfurl and flicker in a kind of methodical, episodic rhythm, are 100% CGI. There isn’t a pixel in them Atkins hasn’t essentially created from scratch, and this dreamlike surrealism runs beyond the intentional into something else: I want to call his work post-verbal, but as narrative it might actually be pre-received, or pre-processed. I mean that because we live with images on screen all the time and have for years, our instinct for Atkins is already in our blood, even if our ability to describe his intention isn’t yet fully formed. We internet addicts of a specific vintage—I mean we who’ve straddled a world both with and without personal computers—can locate Atkins’ fake-real markers well enough. Here it’s rendered human hands, a chimpanzee, leaves, water, sky, a bed. The insistent, grabby text frames look hokey and familiar, too. Thus we automatically understand that something is happening here we might recognize. That’s what hooks us, and our hunger to realize his pattern of communication is engaged like a heat-seeking missile.

Keep reading at Glasstire. Read Morton’s notes on the exhibition here.

As part of the Chinati Foundation’s Made in Marfa schedule of events over Chinati Weekend, Ballroom Marfa will host a tour of Äppärät, on Friday, October 9 at 5pm.

Curated by Tom Morton, Äppärät is a show about the mammalian hand, and the tools it touches, holds and uses. Taking its title from the name of a fictional, post-iPhone device at the center of Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 near-future novel Super Sad True Love Story, Äppärät is concerned with labor, play and the uncertain zone between the two; with the extension of the body, and the self, through technologies ancient and contemporary; with things (to borrow Martin Heidegger’s formulation) “present-at” and “ready-to” hand; with compulsion and with death.

Äppärät features 13 artists from across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, from major art historical figures to practitioners in the early phase of their careers, including Ed Atkins, Trisha Donnelly, Melvin Edwards, Cécile B. Evans, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Roger Hiorns, Sophie Jung, Lee Lozano, Marlie Mul, Damián Ortega, Charles Ray, Shimabuku, and Paul Thek.

The tour will be led by Ballroom Marfa Associate Curator Laura Copelin. Complimentary champagne will be served in the Ballroom Marfa shop.

Äppärät is on view through February 14, 2016. Read curator Tom Morton’s exhibition notes here.

Scenes from the September 25, 2015 opening reception for Äppärät. The event featured performance works from Sophie Jung and Roger Hiorns, and was followed by a DJ set by Mike Simonetti. Thanks to everyone who came out!

All photos by Alex Marks.

Some notes on Äppärät

This is a show about the mammalian hand, and the tools it touches, holds and uses. Taking its title from the name of a fictional, post-iPhone device at the centre of Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 near-future novel Super Sad True Love Story, Äppärät is concerned with labor, play and the uncertain zone between the two; with the extension of the body, and the self, through technologies ancient and contemporary; with things (to borrow Martin Heidegger’s formulation) “present-at” and “ready-to” hand; with compulsion and with death

Äppärät begins with Jessie Flood-Paddock’s Just Loom (2015), a wall painting-cum-sculpture based on an illustration of a worker operating a loom from Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751-72), one of the first attempts to record and systematize all human knowledge in published form. Writing on this image in his 1964 essay The Plates of the Encylopedia, Roland Barthes observed that the operator of this proto-industrial machine is “not a worker but a little lord who plays on a kind of technological organ [who] produces an extremely fine web”. Just Loom combines this Enlightenment-era depiction of labor (or is it leisure?) with a very 21st-Century sculptural tableau, in which a bolt of mesh-like Kevlar fabric becomes the ground for several rubberized casts of the artist’s hand and forearm. Looking at Flood-Paddock’s work, we might think of a contemporary “prosumer” prodding at his or her smartphone, leaving a meniscus of greasy residue on its screen as they do work disguised as play.

From the Stone Age to the digital age, from the pre-human to the post-human, Äppärät suggests not only a neglected history of touch, and of tools, but also how this might help us arrive at what Barthes termed “a certain philosophy of the object”. Originally conceived to hang from the ceiling of Sigmund Freud’s study in Hampstead, North London, Damián Ortega’s The Root of the Root (2011-13) is a sculpture formed from implements created by a community of chimpanzees in the Gashaka-Gumti National Park, Nigeria, gathered by the artist on a research trip in the company of a group of UCL primatologists. (While tool use is common in the animal kingdom, from insects to crustaceans, birds to monkeys, their symbolic use is restricted to the higher apes). If we might read this work, as Ortega has said, as an index of how “the hand transforms nature”, it is also a technological precursor to the objects displayed by Shimabuku in a pair of museum-like vitrines entitled Oldest and Newest Tools of Human Beings (2015). Here, Neolithic hand-axes are set beside web-enabled Apple products of the same dimensions – tools created by members of the same species, albeit millennia apart. The artist’s deadpan presentation inevitably invites questions: which technology might be more usefully substituted for the other, which will persist the longer, which constitutes the greater evolutionary leap? In the Ballroom’s North Gallery, Marlie Mul presents a pair of sculptures that take the form of oversized steel grills, of a type commonly used by street smokers to stub out their cigarettes. Burned, ash-smeared, nicotine stained and stuck with discarded butts, these compositions prompt thoughts about our addiction to handheld “devices” (whether they deliver nicotine, or a constant stream of data), and their inevitable passage from pristine objects of desire to (self-) disgusting trash. Mul has also created an onsite intervention at the Ballroom, Cigarette Ends Here (2015), using spent cigarettes gathered from the Marfa bar, The Lost Horse.

Äppärät guest curator Tom Morton spoke with Tom Michael of Marfa Public Radio about the group exhibition that opens this Friday at Ballroom Marfa. Stream or download the Äppärät edition of “West Texas Talk” from Marfa Public Radio.

Get an idea of what’s in store for the Ballroom courtyard following the Äppärät opening with this Mike Simonetti DJ set from Boiler Room NYC. From their site:

The last part of our Good Times partnership series with Jamie xx, Young Turks and A-1 Records back in August at the pop up shop on the Bowery was with the one and only Mike Simonetti, co-founder of Italians Do It Better and now head of his own label 2MR, and basically your favorite DJ’s favorite DJ.

Stream it on Soundcloud, or watch and/or download from Boiler Room. Simonetti’s DJ set follows the opening reception for Äppärät at Ballroom Marfa this Friday, September 25. Reception from 6-8pm, tunes start in the courtyard at 8:30p.

Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1972- 1975, 16’01”. Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30 Gallery, Warsaw.

Future Ballroom Marfa curator, Tom Morton, recently curated a show entitled Panda Sex that runs from November 29 through January 2015 at State of Concept, a non-profit gallery based in Athens, Greece. Tom Morton will curate Ballroom’s Marfa’s Fall 2015 group exhibition, Äppärät.. Tom Morton is also a writer, and contributing editor of frieze magazine. His previous exhibitions include Mum & Dad Show (Cubitt Gallery London, 2007), How to Endure (1st Athens Biennial, 2007), British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (Hayward Gallery London and touring, 2010-2011, co-curated with Lisa LeFeuvre) among many others.

An excerpt from State of Concept:

Twelve notes on ‘Panda Sex’:

1) ‘Panda Sex’ is not a group show that is ‘about’ this or that.

2) ‘Panda Sex’ is group show that is.

3) A thing that is has characteristics, ways of being.

4) ‘Panda Sex’ draws its characteristics from the species Alluropoda melanoleuca – the giant panda bear.

5) ‘Panda Sex’ is composed mostly of black and white works – including paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, performances, sounds and smells – with occasional passages of colour. (Panda bears, of course, are colorful in the hidden zones of their bodies: their tongues, their gums, their genitals).

6) ‘Panda Sex’ is composed mostly of works that pay little attention to sexuality. (Panda bears have a notoriously brief breeding season, as fleeting as three days per year, making the ongoing survival of this species a conservational miracle. The current planetary population of wild pandas is estimated at 1,600)

7) ‘Panda Sex’ has no headline theme, no explicit thesis, no apparent claim to make about the shape of art, or of the world. All that seems to connect the works it brings together are their black and white livery, a few flashes of colour, and flickers, here and there, of sexual desire. It is a show that practices extreme curatorial restraint. (Panda bears, although able to metabolize a wide range of meats and vegetation, prefer to subsist on a diet that is 99% bamboo. In her 2013 essay Radical Bears in the Forest Delicious, the nature writer Amy Leach posits that ‘Pandas have their own wisdom, unaccountable and unamendable, whose roots shoot down deeper than we can penetrate, and if they mind anyone at all it is someone more elusive than man’).

8) ‘Panda Sex’ is concerned with how, not what, an exhibition might mean. It takes it as axiomatic that the work of art will always exceed its exhibition context. This is perhaps best contemplated while chewing on a mouthful of bamboo.